There is a story told of Margaret Laurence, whose name is on this series of memorial lectures, always with a title of “A Writer’s Life,” and I think some of you know that story. She attended a party where she was introduced to a gentleman who identified himself as a brain surgeon. And he said “Oh, you write,” to Margaret. “Well,” he said, “when I retire, I’m going to take up writing.” And Margaret said, “That’s very good. When I retire, I am going to take up brain surgery.”
Now, that joke is germane to this talk on a writer’s life because I’m sure the brain surgeon never got around to writing that book, because when people say they’re going to write a book when they retire, they very seldom do. It’s very difficult at that age to learn to write. And I know, about Margaret, that she never took up brain surgery because, like most writers, she never retired. We don’t retire. We go on until we drop. Or till the great copy editor in the sky reaches down and says, with his little pencil, “Enough!”
I’ve always wondered what produces a writer. Is it the genes or is it the environment? And I think it’s a bit of both. Certainly, it was with me. Certainly, I had the genes. My grandfather was a famous journalist. My mother wrote. My uncle wrote for newspapers. My sister wrote juveniles. My nephew is an editor of Asia Week in Hong Kong, my niece works for CBC News, my son is an editor on the London Free Press.
But there was also environment. I was going to say I began writing at the age of four, but I couldn’t write. Actually, I began telling stories to my little sister. The main story was about a fluffy rabbit who owned, and drove at huge speeds, a small red car. You know, just think about it, that’s not a bad idea, I must get that on paper. The first sounds that I remember are the sounds of an old Remington typewriter clacking away in the next room – my mother trying to write a novel which she never sold. But she did write later on. She sold articles to Saturday Night and to the Family Herald and Weekly Star, and the Dawson Daily News. I was the boy on the bicycle who took down the copy every week and gave it Harold Malstrom, who put it on the linotype.
So I was used to the writing business – that was where my genes were. But my parents did not want me to be a writer. My mother said, “Oh, no, you’ll never have a clean shirt.” My father and my mother wanted me to be either a research chemist or a chemical engineer. To please them, and myself, I set up a lab in my basement. I had retorts and Erlenmayer flasks and Florence flasks, and I had bottles of sulfuric acid and nitric acid – the whole shmear. But looking back at it now, I realize that I was more interested in the show business aspects of chemistry. I used to hold regular chemical shows in our garage. I’d charge a nickel and about twenty people would come and I’d pick up a dollar exploding things, changing colours of liquid, pouring sulfuric acid into sugar, putting out an enormous amount of ash, I’d make an explosive with potassium chloride and sulfur and I’d put that on the streetcar tracks and have a lot of fun. But I was really more interested in newspapers.
I realize now, as a parent and a grandparent, that you should be looking to see what your kids really like to do, and not what their parents think they should do. I was putting out newspapers in public school, in high school, in the Boy Scouts, in the mining camps, and at Victoria College, B.C. But it wasn’t until the end of the second year that I thought of becoming a newspaperman. Why? I asked myself. Why are my marks in chemistry so awful? Answer: You spent all your time, not in the lab, but working on the college paper. Ergo: You should become a newspaperman.
I dithered about. I remember there was some kind of rally going on – a big argument or something – and some kid said: “What are you going to be when you grow up?” I said, “I’m going to be a newspaperman!” Just like that. I’d not thought of it until that moment. But it clicked and I went home and I said to my parents, “Forget about the chemistry, I’m going to be a newspaperman.” They groaned at that. “You know,” my mother said, “chemists are making as much as fifty dollars a month.” This was back in ’39.
I actually applied for a job at the Victoria Colonist, and was turned down by a man named Hugh MacCallum, whom I later met, many, many years later, and he said, “Don’t ever announce that I turned you down. I don’t need that on my conscience.” Actually, it was the only time in my life that I’ve ever asked anybody for a job. I’ve been very fortunate; all the jobs have come to me. That’s the only time I asked and it’s the only time I’ve ever been turned down. Maybe that’s why I never asked again.
When I was at Victoria College, I used to read the UBC college paper. The bylines became familiar to me (one of them I married, and became very familiar). I realized that the people who got the bylines and did well always got a job downtown on one of the three Vancouver newspapers – first as a college correspondent, and later as a full-fledged reporter. So I said, That’s what I’ll do. It’s only a two-year course here in Victoria. In my third year I’ll go to university and I’ll work on the college paper. And that is what I did. When I reached UBC, I discovered that a friend of mine, who was the college correspondent for the Vancouver News-Herald, couldn’t do it anymore because his marks were too low. So I took over the job, and just squeaked through my year. That was the start of my newspaper career.
I finally went on to a permanent job at the News-Herald. In my college days, I had been paid twenty cents a column inch. Now I got fifty dollars a month, which was what chemists were getting, later on. I bracketed my wartime training with work on newspapers. But the enthusiasm I had for newspapers did not last. I began to feel a sense of déjà vu, because you keep repeating yourself every year. You write the Christmas story, you write the New Year’s story, you write the Bible story for Easter. There was a guy who worked up in our New Westminster bureau, and every autumn he’d write the same story. “The Fraser Valley was a riot of colour today as Mother Nature dipped her brush in Jack Frost’s palette,” he’d write. My friend Harry Filion used to phone me every fall and say, “He’s done it again! It’s in there.”
That was the first intimation I had that it wasn’t really what I wanted to do in life. The second intimation came later. I sat across the desk from a very old man. His name was Jack McDonald. At least I thought he was old – he had white hair. He was retired and they’d given him the usual gold watch but he didn’t know what to do, so he came back and they gave him a job writing the “25 and 50 Years Ago Today” column. Jack had a little bottle of rye in his desk and he used to give me a slug every once in a while. One day, the city editor came to me and said, “Look, I want you to rewrite Jack’s column today, it isn’t working. It’s not very good. But don’t tell him.” So I thought, Okay, I’ll go to the morgue and I’ll look up the paper twenty-five years ago and write about it. Which I did. And there on page one was a scoop – right across the page. “Three Criminals Give In to the Vancouver Sun,” by Jack McDonald. And I thought, My God! Here I am, a young whippersnapper, rewriting the story that made him famous, because he no longer can write. I’m getting out of this business.
I didn’t ask for a job; I waited for one to come along. It came along when Scott Young came up from Maclean’s and offered to hire me. Arthur Irwin was then editor of Maclean’s. Arthur is the one who really made the modern Maclean’s. But he was very careful of who he hired, and he phoned a lot of people to find out about me. He phoned his friend Fred Soward, who had tried to teach me history. Alas, I was rarely in his class. I remember what Soward said to me at the faculty tea: “Berton, I did my best to fail you, but you just squeaked through.” I didn’t tell him about his true-and-false questions, when, if you flip a coin, you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance, which is exactly what I got.
Irwin said to his friend Soward, “What do you think about this man, Berton?” Soward said, “He might have been a brilliant student if he hadn’t spent all his time on that goddamn college paper.” And Irwin said, “That’s the man I want!”
The truism is that in some ways the news business is a good background for a writer, especially a non-fiction writer. It certainly helped a fiction writer, Ernest Hemingway. But there are problems with journalism, and I suffered from them. It teaches you to make fast decisions, which is great. But it also teaches you to be glib. It teaches you to use the shorthand of communication which is the cliché. To this day, I have to go through my copy after I’ve written everything down to try to get the clichés out of it. And thank God I’ve an editor who finds the rest of them. Because I miss a good many.
I was at Maclean’s for eleven years, and it was there that I got the kind of training I needed. I was taught what research was. And I was taught that you had to have evidence for every foolish statement you made, or you didn’t make it. Irwin and Ralph Allen used to write in the margins. “Evidence?” Or “Who he?” Which meant they didn’t know who the hell I was writing about. That is the title of Bob Collins’s recent book about his days at Maclean’s: Who He?
The second thing that Maclean’s did was to teach me about other people’s writing by making me an editor. I had to put a blue pencil to hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts. You learn to write by fixing other people’s work, and I found it was invaluable.
The third thing that Maclean’s did was it made me a nationalist. I was only intending to stay in Toronto for two years. I wanted to go to the good old U.S.A. and work for Life magazine or the Saturday Evening Post, or one of the big mags. No way, after Maclean’s! William Van Horne once said that working on the CPR would make a Canadian out of the German Kaiser. Working on Maclean’s made me a nationalist. You couldn’t help it. We were a cocky bunch. We were convinced that we were putting out the best magazine of its kind. We did not want to compete with the American magazines, and we knew that they could not compete with us on our turf. And our turf was Canada. So we knew exactly who our audience was and who it wasn’t. And it’s there I learned from people like Arthur Irwin, Ralph Allen, and the great Bruce Hutchison, who was my mentor, something about this country.
The other thing Maclean’s did for me was they gave me the research material out of a series of articles for two books. My first book sold the magnificent total of fifteen hundred copies. That was pretty good in those days – didn’t make me any money, but it was a book. The second one sold three thousand copies, and won me my first Governor General’s Award. You see, in those days, promotional schemes of the kind we now indulge in did not exist. There was no book promotion. There were few bookstores. I remember when I was training in Brandon and I went into town to buy a book. I couldn’t; there were no bookstores! There were no shopping malls to attract bookstores. There were few book pages in the newspapers: the Globe and Mail and I think one or two others. But there weren’t really book pages worthy of the name. Nobody was writing about books. Nobody knew about books. There were no bestseller lists, no television. Books were promoted over glasses of sherry in the bookladen offices of the gentleman publisher – who wouldn’t soil his hands on cheap commercialism. Some of them tended to look down on Jack McClelland because he actually promoted books. He was the authors’ friend. At the beginning, the other book publishers tended to sneer at him, until they found that he was selling books.
Farley Mowat and I were once sent, at huge expense, to Montreal to take part in a double autographing at Morgan’s. They had a table for us there and behind it were lots of our books on a kind of a library shelf. The book guy said, “There, that’s your table, that’s where you sign,” and he walked off. Farley and I sat there, chatting away pleasantly, but a little nervous, because nobody was coming. Finally a man came along with a book by somebody else, and we signed it. And then I said to Farley, “Look, we better sign some books. You sign my books with your name, and I’ll sign your books with my name.” We took them all out of the shelves, we signed them all, wrongly, put them back, and walked out of the store without anybody saying goodbye. That was the situation as it existed when I began in this business.
I began writing books partly because of Maclean’s – I had done the research – but also because I found that the CBC liked to call “authors” for panel discussions. “Best-selling author,” they called us. As far as the CBC was concerned, and as far as the private station was concerned, you were an expert – a “best-selling author” even if you hadn’t sold many books. So there was a little bit of extra dough to be made from panel discussions for the CBC, and we all grabbed at it.
I finally decided I had to write a book that wasn’t based on early research. I had to write the best book I could. I searched around for a subject, and suddenly I thought, “Well, what the hell am I thinking about? I’m from the Klondike, my father was in the gold rush. That is the story. It’s a great story and I’m going to write it.” My mother said, “Why on earth would you write a story about the Klondike gold rush? Everybody knows that story.” Well, every body did in her circle, perhaps, or thought they did. But she didn’t, and I didn’t, and not many did until I wrote Klondike.
This was a complicated book – the kind I liked best, in which people move through time and space in large numbers – seeking a goal. It was a bit like a detective story doing the research. You go from one source to another to find out where the research is and you go from one person, and in this case to another, because there were people still left alive.
We had driven across the country interviewing old-timers. When my wife and I reached Seattle, somebody at the Sourdough Association said, “You know, I think that Belinda Mulroney is still alive somewhere.”
Well, I gasped. Belinda Mulroney was one of the great figures of the Klondike. She was a washerwoman’s daughter from Chicago who was a stewardess on the S.S. City of Topeka during the gold rush. She kept on going all the way to Dawson, and when she got there she had a fifty-cent piece left and she threw that in the Yukon River and said, “I won’t be needing this anymore,” and she didn’t.
She was one of the great figures of the stampede. She ran the best saloon, the best hotel, and knew everybody. She had married the Count de Carbonneau and gone to Paris driving up to the Champs-Elysées with a coach-in-four. He wasn’t the Count de Carbonneau, he was just plain Charles Carbonneau, a Champagne salesman from Montreal. It didn’t matter. They called her the countess and she accepted the title gracefully.
So my wife and looked in the phone book and there we found a Mrs. C. Carbonneau. But I knew she was dead, so she couldn’t be the right one. “Oh God, let’s go and eat. I want a steak, I’m tired,” I said. Janet said, “No. We will go down to the drugstore and we’ll look in the city directory.” And we went down to the drugstore, my stomach grumbling, and we looked in the city directory and there was a Mrs. C. Carbonneau living miles out of town, but with no phone. Janet got the city directory: “Let’s see who lives next door,” she said. I said, “Okay, phone next door and ask if Mrs. Carbonneau lives next door and ask is she the one who lived in the Klondike?” A woman answered. “I think maybe she did mention it,” she said. “I can’t remember.” I said, “Oh, forget it. Let’s go eat.” And Janet said, “We’re not going to eat. You get in a cab and go out there.” And I did. It was a huge fare, I remember. Seven dollars or something like that. A lot in those days.
I knocked on the door of the little cottage and the door opened and a little wizened-up woman came out and said, “Yes?”
I said, “Are you by any chance Belinda Mulroney Carbonneau?”
“C’mon in, my friend,” she answered, “we got a lot to talk about!”
It’s moments like this that make writing of that kind so exciting. She was great. I never got to eat that night, but it didn’t matter; I wasn’t hungry anymore.
You have to be careful, of course, of oral history. We all use it. But in using oral history you must check it against other facts. I once talked to six eyewitnesses who were on the Juneau wharf on July 18, 1898 and who saw Soapy Smith shot by Frank Reid, and they all had a different version of that story. Which is why you have to mix oral history with some hard underpinning of research.
I got into TV and radio about this time. Why? Well, partly because I was on TV the fourth night it was on in Toronto. I was part of a panel show, and we were all terrified. Hundreds of people waving at us. Three cameras and coils of cable. Well, we’ve all gone through it. But, I thought, Never again will I ever go into this terrible medium! The next morning I was walking down the street and a guy came up to me and said, “I saw you on TV last night. You’re the guy that writes the books.” I thought, “Oh, oh; I better get used to it. Because if he remembers that and the fact that I write books, then that is the future.”
Of course, the other reason I did it was for the money! I don’t believe in the theory that writers do their best work starving in a garret. I think that a writer has to have security. And he gets that security by not having to worry about his mortgage. He also gets his security by doing his homework, which is the research. And then he feels good and he writes. His sense of security is always transferred to the reader. So the reader will know in an instant if the writer is insecure.
I remember Harold Town, the painter, saying to me one day on television: he said, “You know, I’m better than Picasso.” I said, “Harold, you’re kidding.” He said, “Believe it.” And after, he said, “I’ve got to believe it. If I didn’t believe I was that good, I wouldn’t be able to paint properly and everybody would know it.” He said, “You’ve got to believe you are the best.” There’s something in that.
When I wrote Klondike, I was secure. I loved writing it. I was writing about my own part of the country. I told Jack McClelland it would sell ten thousand by Christmas and he told me, on Christmas Eve, that it had sold ten thousand. “You win!” he said.
When I do the research on a new subject, I have to ask myself, What is this book about? Oh sure, this book was about the Klondike gold rush. But what’s it really about? That’s the question I had to ask before I wrote the final draft, which was based on what I thought the real story was.
The real story came to me in the research. I discovered that all these guys who climbed the icy mountains and made their own boats, and went down the river and died and starved and fought their way through the rapids, and finally got to the Klondike, didn’t bother to go out to the creeks to look for gold. They shambled up and down Front Street until the next steamboat came and they got on it and went home. Why? Because they’d done, really, what they set out to do: to test themselves against the elements; to prove to themselves what they could do; to learn about themselves. This Klondike story, I decided, was much more than a story of gold. It was a story about man’s search for himself.
I didn’t like to say this in so many words. The theme, I thought, ought to be underneath. But I knew I’d need a little quote in the book that gave a slight hint. I looked all through Bartlett and couldn’t find anything and finally found this one:
“All my life,” he said, “I’ve searched for the treasure. I have sought it in the high places, and in the narrow. I have sought it in deep jungles, and at the ends of rivers, and in dark caverns – and yet have not found it. Instead, at the end of every trail, I have found you awaiting me. And now you have become familiar to me, though I cannot say I know you well. Who are you?” And the stranger answered: “Thyself.” From an old tale.
Which I wrote myself, of course. Made it up. It’s my job to do that. I’m a writer, so I wrote it.
Now, it’s interesting that Klondike was a successful book and won me my second Governor General’s Award. It was really my first book of narrative history. I wrote fifteen other books before I wrote the next book of narrative history, which was The National Dream. One of them was my favourite book, The Secret World of Og, a children’s fantasy, in which real children who watch television and read series books and love comic books and hate Pablum – they romp through this book, to the horror of librarians and to the horror of the editors. This taught me that you don’t write children’s books for children, you write them for librarians and children’s editors. That’s our real market, they kept saying. I had a little scene in which a kid paints himself green in the interests of espionage and going among some green people. And they said, “You can’t do that. Every kid will want to paint himself green!” And I said, “Well, I hope so. Every boy, sometime in his life, should paint himself green.” I left all that stuff in. It’s still going on, as Robert Munsch knows. But it was very bad then. The conspiracy against children, I call it. That book was my most successful book. We’ve lost count of the number of copies – more than two hundred thousand.
I go to schools sometimes and I read chapters from it for the little kids in grade four, and quite often they’ve painted themselves green because of the book. They’re painted green, and the last one I went to, even the teacher was painted green! And I thought, “I won.” That’s probably the only influence I’ve ever had in all my writing – gotten a teacher to paint herself green.
One of the reasons I couldn’t write these big complicated books was because I was writing a daily column after I left Maclean’s. (They objected to me doing television and radio, so I walked out.) I had a fail-safe – the Star was after me, so I took the job. The columns were very long in those days and they appeared every day. God, it’s easy now, Dalton Camp does two a week: eight hundred words each. I wrote twelve hundred words every day, five days a week. I wrote 1.2 million words for the Toronto Star, which is the equivalent of five Klondikes. I get tired just thinking about it. I was also doing radio and television.
And then I wrote The Comfortable Pew, a tract which raised an awful fuss and made the church very mad. And then I wrote The Smug Minority. I read a while ago that it got the worst critical drubbing of any book ever published in Canada. Now, not many people can make that statement. And oddly, that book sold very well and made more money for McClelland & Stewart that year than any book that they had. We sold seventy thousand copies of The Smug Minority. But Jack McClelland, in the interests of promotion, had announced in advance that he was going to print the largest first printing of any book in history: one hundred thousand! So it didn’t make one hundred thousand, it only made seventy thousand. Big deal. Failure! said the critics. But it was the biggest money-maker he had that year.
The wisest thing Jack ever said to me, and he said many wise things, was: “Don’t ever read reviews. Measure them.” He was right. Once I got an awful review – I can’t remember the book – in one of the local papers, I think the Globe. A really slashing attack! Oh God, I thought, I’m going to quit this business, who needs it? And as I said that, I was walking down the street in my hometown, Kleinburg, and a guy came up to me and said, “Wow, did you see that piece in the Globe? An eight-column headline? They mentioned your book about twelve times. You must be feeling very proud.” I thought, By George, Jack was right.
You know, I was once invited to go to Fairbanks, Alaska, to the University of Alaska, and it was a very refreshing experience, because they treated me as a literary lion. They didn’t know about The Comfortable Pew, they didn’t know the things I’d said on radio, or written in my column, or on television. All they knew was that I’d written Klondike, which they revered, because it was about their part of the country. I was treated like the Ernest Hemingway of the Yukon. Very refreshing! I enjoyed it and then I jumped into the soup again as soon as I got back.
Twelve years, as I said, went by between the first narrative history and the next one, which was The National Dream. I was only going to write one book about the railway, but it expanded into two. I chose it because it’s a very good story. It tells something about the country and because again, like the gold rush, it involves a great many people moving in a complicated way through time and space. To be able to write it, I had to quit two jobs. So I took a real gamble on these books, which I thought would sell ten thousand copies, as Klondike had. I quit a very lucrative television program called Under Attack and I quit my job at McClelland & Stewart.
Jack, in one of his weirder moments, had put me in charge of his Illustrated Books Division and then had promoted me to editor-in-chief. He didn’t have a real one around, so I was called editor-in-chief. I went to him and said, “Jack, I only have two choices. I can be your editor-in-chief, or I can write a big book about the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.” And before he had a chance to decide, I said, “And I’ve decided to do the book about the Canadian Pacific Railway. Goodbye. It’s been nice working with you.”
Now, a lot of people, like my mother, when I did Klondike, couldn’t understand why I was writing what seemed to them to be a company history. I remember Morley Callaghan said, “Why have you taken that subject? That is boring.” Well, it had been boring. Harold Innis wrote the definitive history of the CPR, which made him a name because he discovered new things about the country. But the book itself is unreadable. The footnotes are longer than the text. Sometimes there’s only one line of text and then there’s all this little type. Holy God, who can get through that? The next book about the railways had been written by the public relations officer of the CPR. It was called Steel of Empire, and it wasn’t a bad book. But, he was the CPR’s PR, so he took a certain point of view on it.
I spent a long time on the research for these two books and I didn’t write one word until I was absolutely certain that I’d done my homework. Now I had to get away to write the books. But how could I get away with these stacks of research, all bound in loose-leaf books?
So I announced to everybody that I was going to Mexico to write the books. I didn’t go. To my wife’s absolute horror, I had the phone taken out. Left myself totally incommunicado. Sat down and obsessively started the books. Writing from eight in the morning till midnight. I was young and healthy and energetic in those days. It was summertime, I didn’t have to do radio and television. And I wrote the first draft of The National Dream in three weeks. I know, you can take a look at it, it’s sitting at McMaster University with my papers. It’s not very good. But it’s on paper. The thing for me always is to get it on paper as quickly as possible.
I have to tell you that I love doing it. I couldn’t wait to get to the typewriter. The story was so good. The story of the Pacific Scandal, for instance, was a wonderful story, it took two chapters in my book. I couldn’t stop. It ran through my head at night and I was thinking about it all the time, which made me terrible company.
When the book came out, it got a very interesting reaction. The academics didn’t understand what I was doing. Because except for Bruce Hutchison – my mentor, whose work I admired and whom I knew well – nobody in this country was writing this kind of narrative history. The well-known kind of history being written in Britain and certainly in the States by people like Barbara Tuchman, nobody had attempted it here. And the academics – they were flattering, I guess – treated it as a scholarly work, which it certainly wasn’t. It had the scholarship in it, but I tried to keep that hidden so people wouldn’t think it was a textbook. Some historians were very upset because I put the footnotes at the back, rather than on the same page in little, tiny type. Academics sprinkle these numbers through their books, but I wasn’t going to do that. It would turn everybody off – they’d think it was a textbook. I had a line-by-line count at the back. Line 4, source. Line 8, source. You’d be surprised at the number of academics that were really upset about this because it meant they had to do some work. But I didn’t care about that.
When they said there was nothing new in the book, it’s all old stuff, I was baffled. I thought, How can that be? I’m the first guy to read the diaries of the surveyors. I’m the first guy to write that John A. Macdonald rigged the Royal Commission at the time of the Pacific Scandal. That’s not even in Creighton. Why do they say there’s nothing new? There’s all sorts of stuff that’s new. And to most people it was all new. It took me a long time to twig what they meant by “nothing new.” What they meant was that I hadn’t given them any new theories about the CPR. Any new insights. Not quite true, but I did the insights and theories under a nice sugar-coating of action. I did not have a chapter saying Chapter Eight: New Insights. I sprinkled it through.
You see, the academics generally wrote books for each other. I must say here that we, none of us who write this kind of history, could operate without the academics, who do wonderful work, on tiny canvases, and it’s very, very important. But I was seeking a larger audience than an audience of academics. And they were thinking of themselves as the audience for this book. They weren’t the audience at all. I couldn’t have cared if none of them read the book.
But I’ve always been grateful to them and have said so from time to time when I’ve had a chance. Today they’re a little less grudging than they used to be.
This was literary phenomenon and I was not expecting it. The books flew out of the bookstores. They took off like birds. Why? Because of the Centennial of 1967. That was only three years before the books appeared. The people were ready for it. They had been fed a strong diet of Canadianism and they wanted more. For the first time for many years in this country, people wanted to go back to their beginnings, to their roots. There was a wave of nationalism which resulted in all sorts of things in the next decade, including the formation of the Writers’ Union of Canada. Also because television was going strong. The CBC’s eight-part series The National Dream was very helpful.
Jack McClelland and I went out on a hectic promotion trip that year. Somebody phoned me in Winnipeg and said to me, “Why are you promoting these books? People buy anything you write. You could write a telephone book.”
“No,” I said, “I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work.”
Promotion will not sell a book. What promotion will do – and this is important – it will tell people out there that you have written the book and it will tell them what it’s about and they will then decide if they want to read it. Canadian readers are very tough about this. We all do these mammoth promotion trips – the kind Margaret Atwood calls the “Kill an Author Tour” – in which you travel around and meet each other in TV stations and you all sit on the bench and the interviewer says “Next!”, you know, like hogs at a slaughterhouse. And yet, after all this publicity, in which your book has been promoted by everybody, people come up to me and say, “Why didn’t you write a book this year?”
So I know that you really have to keep shouting. Thanks to Elsa Franklin, demon public relations woman, Jack and I were sent out across the country to appear at a series of All Canadian Breakfasts: blueberry muffins, Winnipeg goldeye, hotcakes with maple syrup, and a drink, which she had somebody invent, called The Last Spike Cocktail. It was very powerful, and we left behind us an absolute trail of exhausted newspapermen, and the next time I came through they said, “I hope you’re not serving the drinks, because you ruined the day for us and for the newspaper.”
And Jack said he would never eat Winnipeg goldeye again, and I think he’s stuck to that. Me, I still like it. But it was an experience that was almost claustrophobic sometimes at the autographings. I remember at Bolen’s bookstore on Vancouver Island – wow, the crowd was jammed all around me, everybody holding a book and shouting, “Sign mine, sign mine, sign mine!” Later on we learned to put them in line, but we didn’t in those days.
And so the next year we did a picture book too, and you know, I had four books on the bestseller list at one point. I’m kind of proud of that, I guess. Four out of ten, not bad. This is a phenomenon that’s not been repeated. The National Dream was on the list for well over two years. Klondike – we did the new edition of that – came in on the coattails of The National Dream and The Last Spike and it sold another seventy thousand copies.
You’re up one day and you’re down the next in this business. That’s being a Canadian. I kind of enjoy it, I must say. Is it my turn to be slammed this year? Is it a good year, next year?, you always start a year off.
I survived The Smug Minority only to be attacked for writing a book called Drifting Home, which the critics called a potboiler. I wrote it in the Algarve in Portugal over a period of about two weeks. And what a time I had! I can only write with two fingers. (I used to do it with one, and now I do two. That’s real progress.) I’ve moved from a dreadful little Hermes Baby typewriter, which I used to carry around in my big pack in the Army – simply a dreadful typewriter that runs every line together and jams up and everything – to a Smith Corona portable, which I still use. I’ve got four of them because I’m terrified that I won’t be able to buy any new ones or second-hand. I can only work on it. So I had this Smith Corona portable with me when I went to Portugal. I got the travel agent, in advance, to send for a machine that would change 220 volts to 110. It came down from Lisbon and was there when I arrived. I could hardly wait to get to work. I put the typewriter down and plugged the thing in, and it blew up! It blew, I tell you – flames, smoke, everywhere. I don’t know how, or what happened. I’m not very good mechanically. So the real estate agent said, “It’s all right, I’ve got a replacement.” And she came rushing in with – a Hermes Baby.
I still wrote the book. People come up to say they like it. A guy came up to me yesterday and said, “You know what my favourite book is?” and I said, “I know, you’re going to say Drifting Home.” He said, “That’s right.” They all say that.
But most of my emphasis from then on has been on narrative history. I really like telling stories from the past with a strong research background. You know, the great bulk of my major work has been done between the ages of fifty and seventy. Well, fifty and seventy-three, because I’m doing one now. It’s interesting because when I wrote The National Dream, I’d written nineteen books, and since The National Dream, I’ve written nineteen more and twelve of them are books of narrative history, including, I think, three of my best books: Vimy, The Arctic Grail, and The Great Depression.
I had wanted to write a fourth in the quartet of books about the opening of the West and Northwest which would be The National Dream, The Last Spike, Klondike, that would deal with the opening of the prairies, which was spurred by the Klondike gold rush and the presence of the railway. I tackled it several times and I couldn’t get a handle on it so put it aside. I knew I’d write it sooner or later, but I knew I had to learn a little more about putting a book together. I wasn’t ready.
There are lots of books I write now that I couldn’t have written ten years ago. They are more complicated. I finally wrote The Promised Land and by then I had a really top research assistant who is still with me and has worked on all my major books of narrative history since The National Dream. Her name is Barb Sears, Barbara Sears. I couldn’t work without her. She saves me at least a year on a book.
Of course, people, amateurs, think that’s cheating, to use a researcher. Everybody uses them. But I’ve had two different interviewers shove microphones in my face as I step off an airplane and say, “Mr. Berton, one question. Who writes your books? Do you write your own books or do you have somebody do it?”
And I’m only prevented from punching them in the nose because in each case they’re very attractive young women. Attractive, but dumb. Because, of course, a researcher can save your fingers and your feet. I no longer have to sit in the archives with a stack of John A. Macdonald’s letters, which are written in his atrocious hand, trying to figure them out and to transcribe them with a pencil into notebooks. Now we have Xerox, we have interlibrary loan, and I have Barbara Sears. She goes to the archives and brings me back the material I want. She does not decide what’s good and what’s bad. She gives me the raw material, I write it, and that’s how the books are produced.
So, I think, as in brain surgery, practice makes perfect. You continue to learn all your life. There are things I’m writing now that I couldn’t have written ten years ago, fifteen, twenty – certainly not twenty years ago. Because you learn techniques, you learn style, and you learn all sorts of things. You learn to trust your editors. I trust mine, who save me so much. I have two. One who looks at the manuscript – just as I looked at manuscripts when I was a young editor at Maclean’s – and then tells me what’s wrong. What’s dull. What needs editing, what I’ve left out, what the order should be. Janice Tyrwhitt, late of the Reader’s Digest, late of Maclean’s, later with The Pierre Berton Show. I’ve worked with her many years. She saved Vimy by suggesting a new opening.
I have a copy editor, who has an eagle eye for everything, who can actually tell you where to put a comma, something secretaries these days don’t know. But you know, the thing about brain surgery and writing – the thing they have in common – is that they’re both a learning process, I think, that never ends. In writing, of course, you don’t have to show your first drafts. And in brain surgery, well …
I love writing. I love it! Some people tell me they don’t like it. I don’t believe them. Surely, if you hate it, why do it? It doesn’t pay that much. Even a guy like me. No day goes by in which I don’t write something. Sometimes it’s on paper, sometimes in my head. People say to me, “Gee, living in Kleinburg, you come into town, that’s an hour each way. How do you do it?” I say it’s wonderful for a writer. I don’t have a car phone, which sometimes causes me problems. I locked myself out the other day, and I didn’t have a car phone to call the Motor League. But it’s an asset to a writer to be able to be locked in away from the phone, away from interruptions, away from nagging people, and just think about what you’re going to write. And I’ve done that all my life, and a lot of my writing has been done in my head so I’ve been able to go straight to the typewriter and put it down on paper.
I can hardly wait to get to the typewriter in the mornings, I like it so much. I really find it a marvellous vocation. It is hard on those around me. I’m very bad at parties if I’m working on a book, because I’m working on the book at the party, in my head, and I don’t hear what people say. I insult all sorts of close friends by my silence. It’s hard on my wife and some of my kids at home because I hide myself in my office. I have to write, and I should be out, you know, gamboling with grandchildren on my knee, which I do sometimes. But not as much as I might like to, if I were a retired brain surgeon.
The worst thing is to let go of your child – the manuscript you’ve worked over for two years – and you finally have to let it go. It is hard to do. I am always fiddling. They have to tear that script away from me. We used to have galley proofs, now we just have page proofs, but I fiddle with them too, always adding stuff, and the editor is saying, “Just a moment, that’s expensive, you’ll have to take that out.” I can’t help it.
Well a few years ago, I found that I couldn’t walk. I could only crawl. They said it was pneumonia, but it turned out to be a pulmonary embolism. I couldn’t breathe very well. I was trying to start a book called The Promised Land – the book that I finally got around to learning how to write. It took me eight years before I knew how to write The Promised Land, which was a difficult book. Again about large numbers of people moving through time and space.
But I couldn’t write it because I couldn’t breathe. And I was very stubborn about going to the hospital. The medication for the so-called pneumonia wasn’t working and my wife finally dragged me, which is the only way I could move. There are only three stairs in our hall and I had to crawl up them, and I think that suggested to her, if not to me, that there was something wrong.
So off I went to the hospital and they gave me oxygen and they also thought I had cancer of the lymph glands, which I didn’t, but I spent a night worrying about that.
You know what I was worried about? I thought, My God, I’ve got all this research for The Promised Land and I’ve got to write it, but how can I write it if I die? And I thought, Holy God, that’s the worst thing that can happen to a writer. You spend two years and you know exactly how to write it and now you’ve solved this problem which has been with you for eight years. It didn’t work the last time, but now you know how it’s going to start, and you’ve got all this stuff ready, and you’re in this bloody hospital and they’re telling you they’ve got lymph cancer, or maybe something wrong with your lungs.
Well, I didn’t die.
Jack McClelland came over to see me. He’d been in hospital, too, and he had a hospital thing around his wrist and he had a hell of a time getting back out again, because they thought he was escaping from York Central, when he really belonged to a totally different hospital.
So I went back from that and the next day I said to the doctor, “You’ve got to let me outta here, I’ll feel better at home.” And I did, because I got back to my typewriter. It took a little while, a bit slow at first, but I got the book done and it was published and was successful and so on.
So now I face the dilemma that so many of us face. What’s gonna happen? Sooner or later I’m going to be halfway through a book and the Big Copywriter is going to bring his blue pencil down and say, “Out! You don’t finish it.”
I can’t bear the thought. I’ve two choices. I can quit. I can say, “That’s enough.” I’ve written a lot of books – far too many. Ah, why not just take it easy? Why not just lie in the sun, play with the grandchildren, drink the odd drink, go to see the places you want to see – the Taj Mahal and the Grand Canyon, the two places I haven’t seen and want to see? Why don’t you do that? You don’t need to write anymore.
But the answer, of course, is that I do. I cannot quit. I am not a brain surgeon. I have to keep writing, knowing that sooner or later, I will be halfway through something of which I’m proud, but will never get published. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is both the triumph and a tragedy of a writer’s life.
Thank you.